


Jaime’s Relationship with Cersei and Brienne as Courtly Love Deconstruction

by janie_tangerine



Series: in which I stash meta/essays/everything that's not fanfic [5]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Character Analysis, Courtly Love, F/M, Knights - Freeform, Meta, Nonfiction, Trope Subversion/Inversion, knightood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 15:48:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18944062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/pseuds/janie_tangerine
Summary: In which I meta-ed and spent a more or less reasonable amount of words discussing how both Jaime/Brienne and Jaime/Cersei are middle ages courtly love deconstructions, just in very different ways.





	Jaime’s Relationship with Cersei and Brienne as Courtly Love Deconstruction

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted in a less polished version on tumblr [here](https://janiedean.tumblr.com/post/179689309948/about-jc-but-not-in-a-bad-way-i-always-thought-a); the original question was _About JC, but not in a bad way: I always thought a big part of J's love for C was that it was the last "honorable" part of his life. Like he could be a kingslayer and a man without honor, but at least he was faithful to his lady in true courtly love fashion. But now Brienne can help him restore his honor in another way. What do you think?_
> 
> The polished version I'm posting here was also on the meta book I gave Gwen in which I also put the previous four metas. Have a rant! More will come since I have a lot of meta to repost ;)
> 
> As usual: everything belongs to GRRM and the quotes are there to prove a point, I own nothing except the rants.
> 
> Also: this is tagged with both ships because it discusses both ships and they're both pertinent to the subject title. Feel free to scroll if it's not what you're interested in reading. :)
> 
> Also: most of the specific info about knighthood in the middle ages and so on was out of a French book that I read in the Italian translation - I fear there's no English one yet, but if anyone's interested, it's Jean Flori's _Chevaliers et chevalerie au Moyen Age_. The rest is out of my middle ages history exams/classes in high school that I can't source you, but the previous book about summed enough of it. ;)

To understand how and why Jaime’s relationships with Cersei _and_ Brienne are as a whole a deconstruction of courtly love, we need to establish what we mean by _courtly love_ in the first place.

  * Courtly love is a  _specific_ medieval trope which has its roots in:  
  
a) chivalry as an institution;  
b) the conception of love having to be sublimated by  _religious_  feelings;  
c) the premise that it should  _never_  be acted on;  

  * What is important to know is also that in the Middle Ages the church was wildly  _against_ chivalry/knights as a social class/institution for a number of reasons, but mainly because they:  
  
a) held tourneys which were considered immoral (and the church tried to shut that practice down for ages and never could) in order to make money and try to get up on the social class ladder;  
b) killed people (which was against church doctrine,  _in theory_ );  
  
So, around the eleventh century AD, the Church finally started to try and co-opt it. In the sense (as you can see with the crusades) that, being unable to change the ways of that particular class, the Church started painting chivalry as a  _religious_ institution in order to co-opt it. As in: killing people is acceptable if done to kill infidels/enemies of the Church, defending the weak becomes a thing  _morally_ obliging for knights (it wasn’t before) because it’s a religious/pious way of using one’s strength/weapons, tourneys are still considered immoral but they’re accepted as a necessary evil, being a knight is good if  _god_  is giving you authorization;


  * From this situation the courtly love trope is born, as in: when knighthood was a way to move up socially in the ladder it usually happened through knights marrying a woman nobler than they were (most people who tried to do that were third or fourth sons of either noble or medium-rich families who couldn’t inherit - usually the first son inherited everything and the others either went into religious orders or went off like that in order to not split the land), but when the whole religious angle starts to get into it, it became a literary trope (used also to make sure the previous angle would be pushed) that love towards a fair dame/noblewoman was fine on the knight’s part if:  
  
1) it was chaste;  
2) it wasn’t consummated at any point ever;  
3) it included no impious thoughts;  
4) included the knight being 100% willing to die for the woman and fight for her [or her husband] while keeping his faith in god/the church and never,  _ever_  acting on it or it’d have become _impure_ ;


  * At this point we can bring up Lancelot and Guinevere from the Arthurian cycle as _the typical cautionary tale for courtly love gone wrong_. As the story was, it’d have been fine if he had just looked at her from afar and never acted on it, but the fact that they act on it means that she betrays her husband and he betrays his king and so starts the downfall of Camelot and he has to earn back redemption because he sullied himself. That is  _directly_ put into comparison in Arthurian tales with Galahad’s superiority to all other knights. But why is Galahad superior?  _Because he’s pure and wholly untouched by carnal love_  and he’s a virgin wholly devoted to God/the Church/his faith, so while Galahad finds the Graal and ascends immediately to heaven, Lancelot dies old and alone and having to espiate his actions after they cause Camelot’s fall, and  _that_  is basically the basis for most courtly love that came after in all of European literature.



  
Now, as Martin knows his tropes, given that Jaime as a character is in himself deconstructing _knighthood_ , we can deduce that both his relationships with Brienne and Cersei are actually courtly love deconstructions of two different types and are framed as such in the text.

Concerning Jaime and Cersei, we have a more straight-up deconstruction based on the Lancelot/Guinevere situation described above:

  * It plays on that specific narrative because:  
  
a) she’s the king’s wife and she’s betraying him while being with Jaime;  
b) if they’re found out they’d both risk dying/the realm’s stability;  
c) it’s  _not_ a thing that should happen because it’s incestuous other than a betrayal. 



At the same time, though, Jaime projects a  _lot_  of the courtly love tropes on that relationship;

  * Specifically,  _he_ is approaching it exactly the way a medieval knight is supposed to approach his beloved except for the fact that they actually consummate it. This because:  
  
a) he’s entirely chaste outside of Cersei;  
b) he basically  _lives for her;  
_ c) their love fuels a lot of his actions in either good or bad sense;  
d) he sees her as something perfect and above him (or he thinks she’s at his level but really he puts her on a pedestal);  
e) he sees himself in function of his knighthood skills  _and_ what he is to her.



If it wasn’t for the fact that they actually consummate it, it would be  _straight-up_  courtly love;

  * the problem is that on the  _other_ side, the dame/woman is also supposed to be good, chaste, faithful to her husband and if she loves back the knight she might give him her favor and let him know, but it should  _never_ stray from the right/pious path. Now, this conception of courtly love is of course rooted in chastity values attributed to women by a patriarchal society such as things were in the Middle Ages, therefore it also reflects an antiquate conception of how it’s appropriate for women to have sex or not. So this isn’t about Cersei’s sexual habits but how they relate to this specific trope which is in itself medieval/patriarchal. Cersei isn’t any of those things - she isn’t  _good_ , she isn’t dutiful, she’s not faithful to either Jaime or Robert (not that she _should,_ have been but the fact that she doesn’t tell Jaime and lets him believe no one else is there when she could have spun it as ‘I had to but I want only you’ is indicative of how she doesn’t take a possible refusal on his part into account) and  _she_  is the one eventually convincing Jaime to take the leap and get into the Kingsguard, which eventually ruins his life. Cersei is  _all the contrary_  of the stereotypical medieval courtly woman  _except for the looks_ , which is why this is a deconstruction (partial) of  _that_  trope: they  _look_  the part and Jaime  _is_  the part, but Cersei is not and their relationship is still basically straight-up Lancelot/Guinevere with an incest twist;
  * So: in this context Jaime  _absolutely_ sees his relationship with Cersei as pure/uncomplicated/honorable because he’s being faithful to her and chaste  _outside_  her, but technically  _he_  is doing what  _both_  courtly love participants should be doing in the ideal way it should play, because  _he_  is also the one standing on the side being faithful to his intended (same as the dame was supposed to stay faithful to her  _husband_ ) and not bedding anyone else and so on. He’s playing the knight but at the same time he absorbs parts of both the two roles.



When it comes to Jaime and Brienne, we have a deconstruction that _completely turns the trope on its head instead_.

  * Now, the deconstruction is turned on its head beginning with the fact that  _Brienne_ is basically a Galahad deconstruction in herself. Brienne has  _all_  the basic characteristics of the Perfect Arthurian Knight: she’s a  _good_  person who acts selflessly and means her vows, she’s strong, she doesn’t act out of personal gain, for that matter she’s not even  _not_  religious or impious, she sees the good in people and  _will_  go to her death because it’s the right thing to do even if she could avoid that, she goes around with an unique _named_ sword and she’s better at fighting people than mostly anyone. If we want to go all the way, she’s also a virgin, except that then this gets turned on its head because Brienne is:  
  
a) A woman (red flag, because women being knights is already something that Is Not Happening in Arthurian literature or most medieval literature concerning this topic);  
b) Ugly (Galahad is admittedly beautiful);  
c) Doesn’t particularly  _want_ to be pure but has resigned herself to it because she thinks no one will want her, but she has romantic thoughts and surely has sexual thoughts, she’s hardly putting her value in her virginity or purity for anything other than what they mean socially and she probably holds on to it more for pride/because she knows she’s  _supposed_ to and because she doesn’t want to be violated as anyone would.  
  
Brienne as a character  _also_  joins together elements of  _both_  knight and True Courtly Dame, in the sense that she’s a True Knight  _and_  also a  _woman_  with romantic feelings/urges, but the fact that she’s ugly and  _a woman_  means no one takes her seriously, which is where the deconstruction is. As in: the only Real True Knight in Westeros isn’t taken seriously by most people who  _should_  because she’s not a man and she’s not beautiful. On top of that, the two people who actually set Brienne off on her storyline/journey are a) Catelyn, as in another  _woman_  who also never thought she’d end up with a female sworn shield but has enough mental elasticity to realize that Brienne is not attempting to be a knight as a joke, b) Jaime who  _wanted_  to be the Real True Knight same as her, and  _no one thinks honorable anymore_ (Renly Baratheon is a whole different case because he sees her usefulness but not her goodness/her personality beyond that). Again, this is deconstructing the whole apparatus because in an ideal world everyone would notice that Brienne is the real deal, not two people who should have never been in the position to notice;


  * At this point, we can say that Jaime/Brienne turns this trope on its head because you have:  
  
a) Both of them are  _knights_ or want to be;  
b) They  _both_  have elements of the other part (Brienne is a woman with a good heart who is faithful at least to her oaths or principles  _and_  a knight, Jaime is a knight who has loved a woman in the courtly way but has also  _been_  the one waiting chastely for his beloved);  
c) They’ve  _already_  played the part to each other in turn (Brienne has been the knight to his damsel in distress for all of _A Storm of Swords_ _except_ for the bear pit, Jaime has _sent her on a quest_ which is usually what ladies or lords did with knights, not the contrary, Jaime has defended her honor by punching her previous suitor Ronnet Connington in the face and Brienne has taken revenge for his maiming directly on two of the responsible people  _and_  would have been ready to die for him rather than kill him. She has also spent _A Feast For Crows_ going around the Westerlands with a sword  _he_  gave her and a horse  _he_  gave her looking for a princess [Sansa], it has all the typical elements of the standard knightly quest);  
d) This is valid also on an aesthetic level, because while Jaime and Cersei basically fit the courtly love aesthetic to a T as they’re both beautiful and standard attractive, he’s taller than she is and broader than she is and so on, Jaime and Brienne have it reversed because she’s uglier/taller/stronger/broader than him and she’s  _not_  standard attractive;  
e) So, while with Jaime and Cersei the roles are muddled but  _visually_  very clear, with Jaime and Brienne it’s  _all_  meddled and mixed up because  _he_  has the usual visual cues you usually associate with the lady while  _she_  has the ones you associate with the knight, they  _both_  embody  _both_  roles on more than one level.


  * On top of that, we have a whole reversal of the chastity matter, because while as we said above chastity and purity are seen as the selling point of this entire trope, in asoiaf they’re  _not_ the selling point;
  * Specifically:  
  
a) Brienne’s chastity, as stated above, is tied to her looks, not to her  _wants_ (she  _did_  hope Ronnet Connington would want her guys, and she was flattered the people in Renly’s camp would court her before finding out it was on a bet), and she took it as a thing she has to preserve because she  _has_  to but she puts no extra value on it and if it didn’t mean she couldn’t succeed her father properly if she wasn’t a maid anymore she’d care even less;  
b) Jaime’s chastity has only damaged him until now because if someone has sex with  _one_ person only, on and off, since they were fifteen up until thirty-something and  _never_ had anyone else (and spent two of those years in a PTSD-enducing environment) that  _doesn’t_  bode well for their sexual health. For one, it’s obvious when he sees Brienne naked in Harrenhal’s bath:



>   
>  _She jerked to her feet as if he'd struck her, sending a wash of hot water across the tub. Jaime caught a glimpse of the thick blonde bush at the juncture of her thighs as she climbed out. She was much hairier than his sister. **Absurdly, he felt his cock**_ ** _stir_** ** _beneath the bathwater._** _**Now I know I have been too long away from Cersei**. He averted his eyes, **troubled by his body's response**. "That was unworthy," he mumbled. "I'm a maimed man, and bitter. Forgive me, wench. You protected me as well as any man could have, and better than most."_
> 
> Now, it’s telling that instead of assuming the obvious, as in that as a man who has spent a year and some imprisoned and hasn’t seen a naked woman in a very long time he would get hard at the sight regardless, his first reaction is linking it with ‘being away from Cersei’ and _being troubled by his own body’s response_ , as in, he doesn’t even conceive that anyone else could be attractive to him. This when given the nature of their relationship he certainly has undergone long dry spells (not as much as this one, most likely, but still quite a lot), and it’s nowhere near healthy. This when he’s _thirty,_ an age at which no one should have such a troubled relationship with their body’s physical reactions in sexual situations.  
>   
> So, the entire point is also that this whole chastity-as-selling-point is not something to aspire at and Martin knows that perfectly, which is why it’s  _not_  depicted as desirable or romantic,  _except from Jaime and Cersei when they romanticize their relationship greatly_ , the both of them;

  * In this case chastity = technically _honor_ (as honorable love for your lady), but chastity =  _not a positive thing_. In the case Jaime and Brienne got together physically, the entire point would be that to  _him_ it’d be an actual healthy  _normal_  sexual interaction with someone who’s his equal (as a knight  _and_  in the lady  _role_  that she refuses and he is more or less aware he is to her) and not someone he idealizes, because as we already saw neither of them did it when they met. To  _her_  instead he’d be a man who sees her as a  _woman_  and a desirable one, not as some weird ugly midway  _and_  would not be chaste with her when she doesn’t want to be chaste with him, who’d respect her as both knight  _and_  a lady and who has never lied to her about her looks or her skills or anything else (which is what she assumes every time a guy approaches her). The moment they stop being chaste with each other,  **i** f they’re off doing knightly/honorable things together and he keeps on trying to be the person he always wanted to be and do better, then they can  _be honorable together_  and be  _proper knights together while looking out for each other_ without the whole chastity deal hanging in between them or without tying  _that_  to honor or any other concept it has no business being attached to;
  * So, it would be turning the trope on its head because we have two people who are/can ben/have been to each other both knight and lady and who would uphold the *good* sides of courtly love (faithfulness, goodness, honor)  _while_ not being necessarily chaste or not intimate and that wouldn’t stop them from being honorable and chivalrous  _while_  loving each other without needing to hide it or sublimate it into something it’s not. 



So, this whole conception ties to how  _Jaime_  as a character  _in himself_  ( _including_  his relations to both Cersei and Brienne) is a total deconstruction of knightly tropes from beginning to end and these two relationships are also wholly part of his narrative. And it’s an extremely specific narrative choice that means to turn on its head a number of tropes tied to that entire imaginary _and_  that includes Jaime and Cersei being straight-up playing on Lancelot/Guinevere with a negative spin and having Jaime play both parts and Cersei the opposite of her imaginary medieval counterpart, while Jaime and Brienne turns that whole thing on its head by having both of them share it 50/50 in a positive spin.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Jaime’s Relationship with Cersei and Brienne as Courtly Love Deconstruction [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21908590) by [Opalsong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opalsong/pseuds/Opalsong)




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